The Lady of the Stream gets Jiggy and Monty Don's Gonads

Wehaaay! We have grayling spawning. 

No pictures available as yet but will persevere with idiot proof camera. 

I was showing another prospective rod and subsequently the latest addition to the waiting list, around one sunny afternoon last week and there were half a dozen grayling of around a pound getting jiggy on the top shallows. Completely oblivious to our obvious presence they flirted around for a good five minutes, dark fish, fins out of the water spawning in perfect conditions. 

I have been buffing up the fishing hut this afternoon and there were a similar number charging about on the shallows just upstream. For a few years we saw little spawning activity, certainly nothing like the video I took (it’s on here somewhere) around 2012 of twenty or thirty fish spawning on the shallows in front of the fishing hut. Hopefully this will continue the slow resurrection in numbers from a dearth of grayling three to four years ago. 

With the trout season fast approaching I have been attempting to engage the forces of crack willow on the far bank. They have been inaccessible for much of the winter due to a combination of depth of water and my diminutive stature (175 cm at the last count) Most of them have been conquered, but there are a few that remain protected by deep water. I made one attempt to tackle them, but with half an inch to the top of my waders and a river that is really pushing through, I sought a safe retreat. Not sure if it is my ageing frame or just a lively river but it was difficult to maintain a firm footing in fast flow and four and a half feet of water. 

It also became apparent while fiddling about in the river, just how clean the gravels are and how much silt has been sent on downstream this winter. Inevitably the river colours up when you jump in and start doing some work, but this week it has been very quick to clear once the work is done. 

Most afternoons are seeing an increasing number of olives coming off the water with several fish taking them off the top, no hawthorn yet but we’ve a few big bees undertaking slow motion bumbling about the place. No sign of any frog spawn or toad spawn yet, although we are yet to see flat adults on the lane, squashed by cars as they make their way from the bankside verge to the Millstream and river. 

They are not the only ones to be caught out by Brer Automobile. Modern cars are increasingly quiet, especially the ones that run on batteries. What impact this will have on the percentage of all species killed on the road may become apparent in the coming years. 

You may or may not recall that in 2019, I lost a lot of hearing on a flight to Toronto and must now wear expensive ear trumpets. I have one very good ear and one ear that hardly works at all. With only one ear left I have made a conscious decision to look after it and invested in an expensive pair of noise cancelling headphones to wear when working with machinery. I think I made the traffic news last year when cutting the hedge along the road. Engrossed in my work and warming to my task it may well have been half an hour before I looked around and noticed the four cars trying to get past me on the narrow lane. 

Even without my magic headphones I get caught out by the few electric cars that now inhabit the parish. Numerous times I have been walking down the road with the dogs, oblivious to the big pile of batteries slowly following me down the road. Moss and Dougal have now learnt to give me a nudge to let me know that there has been a car behind us for what may have been the last hundred yards of the walk. 

Not for no reason am I increasingly known as “The walking speed bump” 

There’s talk of an Osprey in the environs, but I’ve not seen it yet. It’s not unusual to see one at this time of the year as they make their way north, stopping off for an easy meal of chalk stream trout by way of sustenance. On our fortieth birthdays, my late employer threw a birthday party for us in the big room over the road. An Osprey turned up, perched in a long dead tree by the fishing hut before plucking a fish pushing two pound from the river. With most of the room outside of multiple glasses of champagne, it was decided that this must be a portent from a greater force and major events over the coming years would confirm this, 

or possibly we would grow wings and turn pescatarian. 

Well eighteen years on we’re still waiting, I still don’t eat much fish (Scallops, Calamari on holiday) and neither of us can fly, although we haven’t really tried of late. 

It was a good party though. 

The chalk valleys currently play host to a Capybara called Samba. Not yet seen it on the short stretch of the Itchen that I fall in and out of, but it’s been spotted south of Winchester and possibly thirty odd miles away at Stonehenge, although this may have been a sheep. It has yet to be ascertained where Samba will fit in to the fishery management hierarchy on the chalkstreams but the principle fear is that she will join the coup instigated by Brer Beaver and soon our overlords on the chalk rivers will be, with a nod to Orwell, a politburo of oversized toothy rodents. 

What times we live in, at which point I’d recommend an excellent article in The Thunderer this week by Sir Monty Don highlighting the bollocks (Monty’s words) that is the cult of rewilding, it’ll be on the internet somewhere, possibly accompanied by an AI generated picture of Sir Monty’s gonads. 

We’ve had some fine weather of late but today it turned cold with a wind from the north and tonight we are forecast another frost. All the fruit trees about the place seem to have entered a state of stasis, unsure as to whether to go yet or not, the Wisteria often gets caught out at this time of year, but the Mulberry tree knows stuff and never mistimes its run. 

Myself? I have an allotment up the road that has only just dried out. Potatoes, carrots and Broad Beans have gone in a little later than normal and I have a shed and poly tunnel at home filled with plants that will hopefully fill the freezer this summer should I get the planting out time right. This time last year we had a very late frost towards the end of April that did for my runner beans, although returns of other fruit were the best for many years. The warm weather stuff did well, I froze seventy kilos of plum tomatoes and had oodles of peppers, cucumbers and chillis. Sweetcorn also very good although peas, runner beans and potatoes not so in the dry conditions and lettuce (forellenschluss – Speckled like a Trout, a spectacular Romaine variety) quick to go to seed. 

Peppers by the way, don’t pay a small fortune for a packet of eight seeds from the garden centre, just pick a pretty pointy pepper from Aldi, dry out the seeds and sow. Works every time, a hundred or more plants and loads of fruit. 

Anyway, where was I? 

Oh yes, Horticultural jeopardy at this time of year. It’s the clocks that do it, plus the gardening frenzy over the Easter break. As soon as the the evenings get longer the barbecue and benches come out and hey geraniums and other tender annuals come on, get out and get with the beat. 

Last year I was caught out by a couple of devastating late frosts and this year am proceeding with caution rather than pressing on regardless at the first hint of sunshine, although the first sign of asparagus spears on the crowns under glass make it difficult to resist embracing a frost free period, however brief.

Plague, Pike and an Imminent New Arrival

Apologies, not another hiatus but a brief period of the plague.

 

Two and a bit weeks ago I started to go a bit funny, had a body temperature of thirty nine and a half degrees and briefly spoke in tongues. After a forty eight hour period of coughing and struggling to breath properly, Madam contacted NHS111 online and an hour later I was on the phone to a medico. The conclusion drawn was that I should proceed to Winchester hospital where, after a series of tests – blood oxygen level – 90%, raised heart rate and blood pressure and a body temperature that was still on the high side, the diagnosis was pronounced as Pneumonia. 

Big bits of antibiotics were prescribed and after a few days of coughing up blood the pills kicked in and I am now firmly on the mend and undertaking lightish duties. 

For most of the time I spent in bed or in the chair (The Cheltenham Festival helped), the weather remained fairly dry and the river is now back within its banks and the whole place is starting to dry out. We had three mornings of frost towards the end of last week that put a pause on some of the buds that seemed to be in a rush to break, but overall you can sense the sparkle that comes with the onset of early spring. 

In the river there is no sign yet of any Grayling spawning. Conditions are perfect with plenty of water on clean gravels and ranunculus beginning to push on through. The general consensus from those who have fished here for grayling for some years is that numbers are recovering from a few years ago when they were decidedly thin on the ground. Several large fish were present throughout last summer, but no sign of them on the shallows just yet. 

There are signs of a few pike nosing around the entrance to a couple of spring holes. Regular spawning spots, the pike are mostly small jacks, probably males waiting for a larger female to enter stage left.

The coarse fishing season on this river has now closed, but a productive tactic in the last few weeks of the season when spinning for pike is if a jack is hooked, keep chucking your spinner or wobbly sprat back into the same hole until you hook the larger female that is drawing the attention of the amorous jacks. Child B and his mate when spinning on the middle Test in their teenage years pulled three jacks between two and four pound from a hole under a larger chestnut tree, before latching on to a large female a shade under twenty pounds from the same hole. 

All pike are returned now as, like many species, their numbers have taken a hit from good old Tarka, but a decade or more ago, a local French restaurant of some renown, would take smaller pike for a particular fish cake recipe whose name I forget.  Germaine the proprietor insisted that chalk stream pike have a superior flavour to any other pike due to the purity of chalkstream water. 

I shall back up this theory with a story about my Dad who once caught a largish pike from a lake next to the Rugby Cement works. In different times, it was banged on the head and taken home to provide sustenance for his family. I didn’t try it but both my Mum and Dad insisted that it tasted of cement. 

During the ten years or so when we travelled extensively in France in pursuit of coarse fish various in many different rivers, the locals would invariably hammer the pike and zander for some such recipe or other, and when I fished the Shannon (Lough Ree, Lough Derg) in the eighties there were several parties of Germans filling their car boots with pike to take back to Westfalia and other teutonic parts.

This seems to have drifted off into a reverie on Esox Lucius, so I shall conclude with the recent popularity for fishing for chalkstream pike on the fly. I’ve had a go here a few times, but our pike don’t reach much of a size. On the middle and lower river fish have been taken to over thirty pounds. It’s a clunky cast with a wire trace and large pike fly that threatens to pierce ears or wherever else you choose to take your peircings, but great fun on a 9ft 8wt single handed fly rod. 

Pike done! 

We are now four weeks away from the start of the Trout season on this stretch of the Dever. For much of January and February I was preoccupied with wet weather jobs, keeping away from the riverbank to avoid making a muddy mess. With the river now a little less angry I can begin to think about some of the crack willow on the non fishing bank that needs attending to and I also suspect that the ranunculus will need a trim before the start of the season, a sign that we have received a reasonable amount of winter rain. 

A dry day or a brief period of sunshine brings out a few olives in the afternoon and fish are beginning to look up. We have a lot of trout in the river that have had a proper winter workout in the high water and will be fit and raring to go at the beginning of the season. Before Christmas we had a few vacancies for syndicate places, but these have now all been filled and we are in the fortunate position of once again having a waiting list for rods. 

Oh yes, I turned fifty eight this week. Not sure how that happened and what with some of the capers over the years (a lot of them chainsaw based) I’m pleased to have made it this far. 

I have just completed thirty four years falling in and out of this stretch of the Dever and in early August it will be forty years since I left the North West to work on the southern chalkstreams. Several of my contemporaries have either retired or are on the cusp of retirement, mostly due to the physical nature of the work. I ache a lot, am no longer as quick across the ground as I used to be and can’t lift as much as I used to, add into that recent health issues(recalcitrant back, bursitis in both elbows, psoriasis plus recent respiratory events) and it does cross your mind that it may be time for a life on easy street with biscuit wheels. 

Ok sums must be done and the prospect of a managed decline with fewer hours does appeal, but the breaking buds, the clearing river, the increasing presence of fly and the imminent arrival of another season of trout fishermen leads me to conclude – Nope, not just yet.

 

Oh yes, in other news. Child A and her husband are expecting a baby in September, 

Madam and myself are over the moon and to paraphrase the Iron Lady “We are soon to become a Grandmother”